Shooting Kabul (15 page)

The man with the cane stiffened. “Well, the Taliban are doing the same now.”

The blue-eyed man took another step forward, his lips pursed in a tight line.

“Brothers, stop!” shouted a voice next to Fadi.

Fadi jumped, blinking in surprise. It was his father.

“We cannot go on fighting among ourselves!” said Habib. His strong, deep voice rumbled through the store.

Fadi cringed, wanting to dive behind the ten-pound rice bags. All eyes in the store were on them.

“No one is perfect. We have all made mistakes—Pukhtuns, Tajiks, and others,” continued Habib. “We need to come together as Afghans now, for the sake of our country.” He turned to the blue-eyed man. “You are right, Brother. The Taliban brought order to the country when it was needed.” Then he turned to the group of
men. “Before the Taliban came, the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and others were destroying the country. But now the Taliban are doing the same. They are working with Osama bin Laden, who is using Afghanistan for his own agenda.”

“He's right,” muttered an old woman. Her hair covered by a white scarf, she stood next to the nut bins.

The men next to the butcher harrumphed and walked away, while the blue-eyed man swung his bags around and left the store.

“There will be trouble in Afghanistan,” prophesied the old woman. Then, as if nothing had happened, she went back to inspecting pistachios, sold by the pound.

A sense of foreboding drifted over Fadi.
Things are going to get worse. I just know it.

“L
OOK
! I
T'S
O
SAMA,”
shouted a familiar rough voice.

Fadi stepped out of the boys' bathroom and froze like a rabbit hearing a hawk. The door squeaked shut behind him. He gazed down the hall, looking for the source of the voice. But the hall was bare, with only a few stragglers rushing to class before the bell rang.

“Why aren't you with your towel-headed friends?” growled the voice again.

Fadi inched away from the bathroom. He looked past the water fountain and noticed that the door to the janitor's closet was ajar. Before he could run, two
figures emerged from the dark interior.

Felix stepped out to stand next to Ike. “Yeah, we don't want you camel jockeys around here.”

Fadi's stomach clenched as he surveyed the nearly empty hall. The last student gave him a pitying look and slipped into his classroom.

“What?” said Ike, twisting his lips. “Cat got your tongue?”

“No. A camel got his tongue,” Felix said, and sniggered. He balled his right hand into a fist and hit it against his left palm. An expensive gold watch hung loosely on his wrist.

“I don't want trouble,” squeaked Fadi, edging backward. He stopped. If he went back into the bathroom, he'd be trapped.

“‘I don't want trouble,'” mimicked Ike in a high-pitched voice. “You asked for trouble when your terrorists attacked us.”

“Let's show him some American-style justice,” muttered Felix.

Fadi gulped. He eyed the hall to the right, toward his math class. It was too far away. The closest door led to a seventh-grade classroom. He could make it if he darted quickly past the boys and ran fast. He was about to bolt forward when Principal Hornstein stepped out from
around the corner. His old checkered tie hung loose around his neck, as if he'd been pulling at it.

He looked quizzically from Fadi to Ike and Felix. “Any problem here, boys?”

“No. We just needed to take a leak,” said Ike, as if everything were normal.

“And you?” asked Principal Hornstein, turning toward Fadi.

Fadi's throat was dry, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He looked at Ike and Felix, who were standing like innocent choirboys. “No,” he finally mumbled. “No problem.”

“Good,” said Principal Hornstein. “You two go to the bathroom, but make it snappy.”

As Ike and Felix swaggered into the bathroom, Principal Hornstein turned to Fadi with a contemplative look in his eye. “Is everything all right, son?”

Fadi nodded a little too fast.
Keep it cool
. “Yeah, everything is fine,” he said.

“Well, if you have any trouble, or need to talk to someone, you know where my office is.”

Fadi nodded and scurried to math class.

A few minutes later Ike and Felix wandered in behind him.

“You're late!” said Mrs. Palmer in exasperation. Her
curly red hair swirled in a halo around her head as she scribbled on the blackboard.

“Principal Hornstein said we could go to the bathroom,” said Ike with an insolent smile.

Mrs. Palmer paused for a moment and sighed. “Okay. Sit down.”

Ike gave Fadi a pointed look and slumped into his seat.

Fadi opened his backpack and pulled out his notebook just as Mrs. Palmer put down her chalk and turned back to the class.

“Okay, class. Close your textbooks. It's time for a pop quiz!” she announced.

The students groaned. Along with the others Fadi took out a sheet of paper with shaking fingers. Hunched over the desk, he settled down to sort out improper fractions. He could feel Ike's and Felix's eyes boring into his back. He was going to have to be super careful to avoid them. The consequences were too painful to think about.

Fadi and Anh were in the studio, waiting for Ms. Bethune to show up for art class. Anh leaned across the table toward Fadi and pulled a stack of printouts from her binder. “I did some research,” she said.

“What kind of research?” asked Fadi. His mind was
still on his run-in with Ike and Felix earlier in the day. He felt like a mouse being hunted by sharp-clawed cats. It wasn't a good feeling.

“Research about the competition,” said Anh.

“Oh,” said Fadi, picking up the scent of her watermelon-flavored lip balm.
Nice,
he thought, then blinked in embarrassment.

“Are you all right?” asked Anh.

“Yeah, I'm fine,” said Fadi. He looked at her and wondered for a moment if he should tell her about Ike and Felix.
But she can't help really, so why bother?

“Okay. Well, my dad always tells me to be one step ahead of the game,” she said, looking pleased with herself. “Yesterday I went online and dug up information on the Take Your Best Shot competition …” She trailed off with a smile.

“And … ,” said Fadi, waving his hand.

“And I found the names of the four judges.”

“Isn't that kind of like cheating or something?”

“Nope,” she said, tossing back her hair. “It's public information since it's listed on the competition's website, under rules and regulations.”

“Oh,” said Fadi, impressed.

“Once I got the names, I dug up more information about them.”

Fadi leaned over the table, shielding the sheets from the group of kids that had wandered in. One of them was Ravi, from photo club.

“Here's the first judge, Millicent Chao,” she whispered. She flipped through the printouts. “She's the director of the Exploratorium.”

Fadi looked down at the smiling face of a middle-aged woman in a pink pantsuit. Her lengthy bio was attached. As Fadi skimmed the paragraphs, he learned that Millicent Chao was a graduate of Stanford University and had double majored in architecture and East Asian history. She was married and had a daughter who was a dancer with the San Francisco Ballet. She enjoyed taking apart clocks and putting them back together again, cooking experiments, and horticulture, especially growing bonsai trees.

The second page was the home page of San Francisco City Councilman Henry Watson. He was fluent in Spanish and Portuguese and owned a Brazilian restaurant in the Castro. He liked to read, surf, and travel, especially to South America. Next was Lauren Reed. She was the regional manager for Kodak film, and there wasn't much information about her, or even a picture.

The last judge was Clive Murray, a photojournalist from the Société Géographique. He was a world-
renowned “image maker” and had won countless awards. Anh had stapled a bunch of sheets about him together, including a bunch of his pictures. Fadi read that Clive's trademark photography style was “capturing the essence of human diversity, cultures, struggles, and joy.” He had worked in every corner of the earth. He had covered a lot of conflicts—including the Iran-Iraq war and the crises in Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Congo—and he had followed the plight of refugees in Sudan, Iran, India, and Pakistan.

Wow,
Fadi thought, looking at some of the photographs Clive Murray had taken. Some of the most arresting images focused on people—portraits of children at play, women cooking, and old men sitting in contemplation.

He looked at Anh in awe. “This is really awesome, all of this research.” He handed the stack back to her, but she pushed it back.

“This is your copy,” she said. “Now all we have to do is figure out what they like and make sure our pictures appeal to them.”

“Thanks,” said Fadi. “You're really amazing.” He slipped the pages into his backpack, his mind churning with hundreds of possibilities of what to shoot.

“Look, I've heard you talking to Ms. Bethune about angles, light, speed, and all that other photography stuff.
It really sounds like you know what you're doing,” she said. “I'm pretty good at doing research and investigating. So how about you help me with my photography and I'll keep you loaded with information?”

“That's fair,” said Fadi. He grinned. “You help us figure out what to shoot, and I'll help us shoot it.”

“Great,” said Anh. “That sounds like an awesome plan.”

Fadi gave Anh a grateful look from under his eyelashes. This was really going to give them a leg up on the others.
Man, she's really like Claudia,
he thought. While at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Claudia and her brother had tried to solve the mystery of one of the statues, given to the museum by Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The first thing Claudia had done was go to the library on Fifty-third Street and do research on the famous Renaissance artist Michelangelo.

“Where's Jon?” wondered Fadi. He looked around for their missing partner.

“Oh, he's out with some viral thing,” said Anh. She pulled out the library books she'd shown him in the library.

“Oh,” said Fadi. “That's too bad.” Jon tended to be sick a lot, poor kid.

“No, he's not,” said a girl on Anh's left. She was from
homeroom, Patty's friend, whose name he could never remember.

“What?” asked Anh.

“Rumor has it Jon was jumped by Ike on the way home from school,” said the girl. Her eyes were bright at sharing a juicy tidbit of gossip.

Fadi gulped. “Are you sure?”

“Yup,” said the girl with a nod. “Ravi saw it happen. Ike took Jon's collection of DVDs.”

“Oh, man,” said Anh. “Was he hurt badly?”

“No, just shook up. But you know Jon.”

“Yup,” said Anh. They did. Jon tended to get hurt easily.

Poor guy,
thought Fadi.

“Sorry I'm late,” said Ms. Bethune. She walked through the door and put down her bag. “We need to get cracking on our collages today since I want to finish this project before Thanksgiving.”

Fadi flipped open the book on undersea life and examined the bold colors of the tropical fish. He blinked, forgetting Jon for a moment as he noticed how the photographer had captured a bright orange and black clown fish nestled in a pale sea anemone. The fish practically popped off the page.

Fadi remembered what his father had taught him while
they'd roamed the hills of Kabul, exploring birds' nests and finding colored rocks. The three key ingredients of a photo were simplicity, composition, and lighting.

The photographer who'd taken the picture of the clown fish had captured all three elements in one picture; he'd chosen the image of a single fish and not cluttered up the picture with too much other
stuff
. Since you couldn't use a telephoto lens underwater, he'd probably zoomed in and cropped the shot tighter. His composition of the shot was impressive. He'd used an artist's technique called “the golden mean” to divide the picture into imaginary thirds both vertically and horizontally, like a tic-tac-toe board. Then he'd placed the subject of the photo, the fish, on or near those imaginary lines or their intersections so that the orange and black fish popped against the pale tentacles of the anemone.

Fadi knew that great photos almost always showed a skilled use of light. The best photos were taken at dawn, in the late afternoon, or at dusk, when the low angle of the sun produced rich, warm colors and long shadows. You needed to avoid shooting at noon, a time when light was “flat.” It could seem very complicated, but for Fadi, once a camera was in his hand and he was looking through the viewfinder, it all fell into place. Then, with one click you could capture an amazing image.